David K. Shipler's Blog

 

By David K. Shipler

 

            TheShipler Report has obtained an internal memo from Susie Wiles, PresidentTrump’s chief of staff, announcing a significant exception to a standing order.The reversal pertains to statements on religion.

Previously, and in multiplereminders, Wiles had warned staff and Cabinet secretaries against upstaging thepresident. Now, she wants them to do just that. She is known as the most candidof Trump’s inner circle, hence her direct language.

On January 21, 2025, the day afterTrump’s second inauguration, she wrote: “You must not publicize yourself, takecredit for successful actions, or hint that major policy initiativesoriginated anywhere other than the President’s fertile imagination—otherwiseknown as his mind. You may not make public statements more outlandish than the President’s,or that provoke either more applause or more outrage than whatever thePresident has ignited. He is the Force, and no one of you must ever portrayyourself as more inspiring, more energizing, or more appalling than him.”

            Then, inearly March of this year, Wiles issued this terse message to the Cabinet: “KristiNoem didn’t get the memo.” Days later, Noem was fired as Secretary of HomelandSecurity after spending $220 million on TV ads that featured herself, deckedout in a cowboy hat, riding a horse in rugged terrain like a marshal come tobring order to a turbulent land.

            Last week, afterTrump trash-talked Pope Leo XIV (“WEAK on crime and terrible for Foreign Policy,”)Wiles sent this urgent memo:

 

MEMORANDUM TO CABINETMEMBERS

            April 13, 2026

 

TO: CABINET SECRETARIES

FROM: SUSIE WILES, WHITE HOUSE CHIEF OF STAFF

SUBJECT: RELIGIOUS EXCEPTION TO MEMORANDA OF JAN. 21, 2025,MARCH 30, 2025, JULY 4, 2025, AND MARCH 3, 2026

 

            The WhiteHouse, noting the President’s recent condemnation of the Holy Father, herebyreverses its previous order that staff and Cabinet Secretaries refrain fromstatements more excessive or inflammatory than the President’s. On the matterof religion, and on that topic only, Secretaries are instructed to fashion remarksthat are actually more extreme, more outrageous, and more arrogant than thePresident’s. We acknowledge that this could present a challenge. But it isvital in maintaining the President’s (self-) image as a stable genius.Everything is relative, as we know. The Vice President, who cannot becommanded, much to the President’s dismay, is nevertheless encouraged to speakin this vein as well.

I.                   For example, it is recommended that the VicePresident lecture the Holy Father on theology, notwithstanding Mr. Vance’s conversionto Catholicism just seven years ago and his lack of formal theologicaleducation. Most voters will not know this, and they will not know that Pope Leowas educated at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago and studied Canon Lawat the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas in Rome. [Vance, followingthe advice, thensaid, “I think it is very, very important for the Pope to be careful whenhe talks about theology.”]

II.                Secretary of War (and Expeditions) Pete Hegsethis instructed to continue his fashioning of the Iran conflict as a holy war.His analogizing the pilot rescue on Easter to Christ rising is just the kind ofstatement that is valued as a way to cast the President, by comparison, in amore reasonable light—grounded, shall we say. Praying at the Secretary’s Pentagonpress conferences, citing God’s blessing on our troops, and declaring His lackof mercy on the enemy are off-the-wall statements endorsed by the White House. Itwould also be helpful to call the Iranian Muslims “enemy infidels who are destinedfor hell”—again, to help the President to be seen as moderate. Or to quote a fakeBible verse from a movie. [Hegseth took the advice. Hequoted a mostly made-up passage from the film Pulp Fiction as if it were fromEzekiel. And he likenedhimself, his troops, and the administration to a healing force, with “Trump-hating”reporters as Pharisees, an ancient Jewish sect, who were “only looking for thenegative” when they witnessed Jesus heal the sick. “Our press are just likethese Pharisees,” Hegseth declared.]

III.             President Trump’s posting of an image of himselflike Jesus, healing the sick, will be difficult to top, but it might inspiresome of you to come up with another outrageous AI concoction. The purpose,again, is to make the President seem rational and cogent by comparison. Awarning, however: Do not portray yourselves as God. Remember, the Presidentdoes not like being relegated to inferior status, and you would undoubtedlydepart soon thereafter to the Cabinet afterlife, wherever that might be.

        Good luck negotiating these treacherouswaters. Please contact the office of the Chief of Staff with any questions. 

This is satire. It’s all made up (except for the quotesfrom Trump, Vance, and Hegseth), a disclosure made necessary by the absurdityof current reality, which prevents lots of people from telling the differencebetween truth and fiction.         

                

 

By David K. Shipler 

            Israel’sgovernment under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has given President Trump plentyof bad advice about Iran. But the rising belief that Israel is to blame for Trump’swar of choice deflects responsibility from the White House, where it obviously belongs.Trump failed to weigh Israel’s interests against those of his own country. He reportedlyignored his advisers’ doubts about Israel’s assessments and predictions.

            As the wardamages the global economy and security, Israel is being teed up as a scapegoat.A most aggressive effort has come from Tucker Carlson, once a Trumpcheerleader, whose recent rant againstthe war includes a malevolent portrait of a president at the mercy of Israel.

“The Israeli government has astoried history of blackmailing US presidents,” he writes absurdly in his MorningNote. “America’s ‘special ally’ is willing to play very dirty to achieveits goals. Dark-money campaign contributions, extortion, physical threats andeven assassination. In their anti-Christian worldview, the ends always justifythe means. They have no issue destroying lives.” (Carlson doesn’t mention “Jews,”but those with an antisemitic bent will surely read it that way.)

Americans’ longstanding support forIsrael has weakened severely. Unfavorable opinions were driven up by Israel’swidespread bombing and brutal blockade of Gaza Palestinians following theOctober 7, 2023 atrocities by Hamas, and have risen further since thecoordinated Israeli and American war on Iran was launched February 28. A PewResearch Center poll taken in March 23-29 found that 60 percent of Americanadults hold a negative view of Israel, up from 53 percent last year and 33 percent in 2022. This could get worse if the conflict is not resolved beneficiallyto American interests. It’s not truly over, of course, and the eventual outcomewill render judgment.

Netanyahu lobbied hard for this war,particularly on February 11, when he gained a rare invitation to ahighly-classified meeting in the White House Situation Room. His pitch to Trumpcame in a period of terrible coincidence, a perfect storm of anxiety andextremism. Gripped by a heightened sense of vulnerability, Israel is led by themost radical, right-wing government in its history. The result is an anti-Araband anti-Muslim strategy driven by religious absolutism and ethnic bigotry.

After the October 7 attack, a waveof existential fear swept through Israel. Hamas fighters, many on motorcycles, hadmanaged to breach Israel’s high-tech defenses around Gaza, shredding confidencein the intelligence and military establishments. Iran then attacked mainly throughits proxy, Hezbollah in Lebanon, forcing Israelis to leave their homes near theborder. Others, evacuated from near Gaza in the south, added to anunprecedented population of internal refugees. Israel felt nearly encircled by Iran’sdetermination to annihilate the Jewish state.

It’s doubtful that Israel’sexistence was truly at risk; it still had the Middle East’s most formidablemilitary. But a muffled drumbeat of fear has always run through Israelisociety, a legacy of the Holocaust reinforced by the perpetual conflict withthe Palestinian Arabs. For most of its history, Israel’s counterpoint to fearhas been aggressive defiance, which the Netanyahu government has translatedinto military onslaughts.

Israel demolished most of Iran’sair defenses and decimated both Hamas and Hezbollah. Last June, the US andIsrael coordinated air attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities. The streets filledwith huge numbers of Iranian citizens, hostile to the Islamic Revolution and sufferingeconomically; many were gunned down, but Iran’s government looked weakened. Thetime for action seemed as ripe as it had ever been.

According to remarkable reportingby Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan in TheNew York Times, Netanyahu and the head of Mossad, Israel’s version ofthe CIA, argued that regime change would be triggered by a joint US-Israeliattack. The Israelis even played a video—imagery, not words, seem the majorinput to Trump’s brain—showing individuals who could take leadership.

“Mossad’s intelligence indicatedthat street protests inside Iran would begin again and — with the impetus ofthe Israeli spy agency helping to foment riots and rebellion — an intensebombing campaign could foster the conditions for the Iranian opposition tooverthrow the regime,” wrote Swan and Haberman. “The Israelis also raised theprospect of Iranian Kurdish fighters crossing the border from Iraq to open aground front in the northwest, further stretching the regime’s forces andaccelerating its collapse.”

To anyone who knew anything aboutIsrael’s record in predicting or manipulating the politics of its enemies, thisconfidence should have raised a red flag. It did among several participants,according to the reporters. In all the efforts to remake the politics of thePalestinians and Lebanese over the years, not a single example of success comesto mind. Israel’s intelligence agencies are good at locating targets forassassination and disrupting technology, but terrible at understanding thepolitical and social dynamics of their adversaries.

The Israelis were also wrong aboutthe military results, at least in the short term, according to the Timesreporters: “Mr. Netanyahu and his team outlined conditions they portrayed aspointing to near-certain victory: Iran’s ballistic missile program could bedestroyed in a few weeks. The regime would be so weakened that it could notchoke off the Strait of Hormuz, and the likelihood that Iran would land blowsagainst U.S. interests in neighboring countries was assessed as minimal.”

Trump seemed nearly persuaded byIsrael’s optimistic predictions. Having cushioned himself with sycophants and purgedIran experts from the State Department, Pentagon, and National Security Council,he had forfeited the opportunity for informed debate. Nevertheless, a fewvoices of skepticism were raised in subsequent meetings.

The CIA director, John Ratcliffe,called Netanyahu’s regime-change scenarios “farcical,” the reporters wrote. “Atthat point, Mr. [Marco] Rubio [Secretary of State] cut in. ‘In other words,it’s bullshit,’” he said.

When Trump asked General Dan Cainefor his views, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff answered: “Sir, thisis, in my experience, standard operating procedure for the Israelis. Theyoversell, and their plans are not always well-developed. They know they needus, and that’s why they’re hard-selling.”

Since those meetings were attendedby only a small circle of high-level officials, somebody inside clearly wantedthe discussions documented publicly. The writers did the reporting for their forthcomingbook, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.

Their account suggests that indeciding to go to war, Trump filtered out cautionary information that did notharmonize with his gut desires. Like millions of his fellow Americans who choosenews sources the confirm their biases, he absorbs only what he agrees with. Andlike authoritarian personalities throughout history, he cows his subordinates.Swan and Haberman note that in the end, despite some reservations, his deferentaides did not argue vigorously against the mission.

Years before, Netanyahu had opposedthe multinational agreement with Iran, negotiated under President Obama tocurtail its nuclear weapons program. It left Iran’s ballistic missile developmentuntouched and placed no limits on its proxies, which threatened Israel. Yet evenwith its flaws, the agreement froze Iran’s nuclear development for a period and—whatshould be most telling for a president—bolstered US national security interests.Trump, who hates everything Obama did, took Netanyahu’s advice and committed theblunder of scuttling the accord, releasing Iran to renew its advance towardnuclearization.

Bad advice doesn’t have to betaken.

Today, while Israel can be blamedfor misreading Iran militarily and politically, it need not be blamed for thewar. The fault is Trump’s. The fault is the collaborators’ he has installedaround him. The fault is the millions of Americans’ who put him back in theWhite House even after seeing his anti-constitutional moves to overturndemocracy.

Even if he were not asemi-dictator, Trump would put the country in danger from his startling lack ofanalytical skills and obvious cognitive impairment. His decline intoimpulsiveness is rapidly advancing, perhaps a symptom common to aging narcissists.Barely any checks on his power are imposed by any branch of government. He rulesby feelings, not facts, limited only by his “own morality,” as he told TheTimes in a January interview.

What a comfort. His own morality.

 

By David K. Shipler 

            One of themost enlightening summations of Donald Trump came from his longtime associateand now chief of staff, Susie Wiles. He has an “alcoholic’s personality,” shesaid in aninterview with Vanity Fair, which means he “operates [with] a view thatthere’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.” She should know. AlthoughTrump claims not to drink alcohol, Wiles grew up with an alcoholic father, thefootball player and sportscaster Pat Summerall.

            Trump’sfantasy of omnipotence helps explain why he swaggers across parts of the globeand tramples his own country’s democratic norms. But his illusion of boundlesspower is now running into the reality of Iran. So is Israel’s imagined abilityto manipulate the politics of its enemies, a practice it has pursued fordecades with absolutely zero success.

Trump has been riding anintoxicating high of adventurism since he found little resistance from earliertargets, bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities last June, blowing up speedboats inthe Caribbean, capturing President Nicolas Maduro from Venezuela in January,and now cutting off Cuba’s oil supplies. He said of Cuba, “I can do anything Iwant with it.” On Iran’s retaliation across the Gulf states, Trump declared, “Nobodyexpected that. We were shocked.”

 An educable president who took advice fromexperts would have anticipated the ruthless resilience of Iran’s odious regime.That is not the president Americans elected. Instead, he has rid government of specialistswho know Iran. He has made the White House into an echo chamber of zealots andsycophants. He has let his incompetent “Secretary of War,” Pete Hegseth, purge thesenior officer corps of many seasoned professionals essential to complex combat.

Furthermore, Trump carries the flawof every dictator. He thinks policy is personified in a single figure, as inhis own administration: hence his misplaced belief that decapitating agovernment will bring it down, as in the seizure of Maduro and theassassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei.

Taking a still picture of a war inprogress can be misleading, for the final judgment usually rests on itsoutcome. So far, the Israel-American onslaught from the air has killed much ofthe leadership, including potentially moderate figures, and obliterated much ofIran’s military.

The regime remains, however, fightingfor its life using asymmetrical warfare against massive Israeli and Americanair power: mostly drones and rockets aimed at the pressure points of the globaloil economy. The US is burning through its arsenal of expensive defensivemissiles, which it’s using to down the relative cheap Iranian drones. Thatlimits Ukraine’s ability to get them to hold off Russia, which poses a much graverthreat than Iran.

Nor is there any sign yet of thepower vacuum that both Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahuanticipated could somehow be filled by an unarmed and unorganized opposition. “Thehour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump toldIranians on February 28, the day he began the war. “Stay sheltered, don’t leaveyour home….When we are finished, take over your government, it will be yours totake.”

Perhaps Trump had been persuaded byNetanyahu, the latest in a long line of Israeli leaders who have tried andfailed to realign Arab and Muslim politics.

            In theearly 1980s, to dilute the Palestine Liberation Organization’s influence in theoccupied West Bank, Israel appointed Menachem Milson, a professor of Arabicliterature at Hebrew University, as architect of a set of rural “villageleagues” composed of moderate, compliant Palestinians. They were seen by thePLO as Israeli collaborators, Jordan threatened to prosecute them for treason, moderatePalestinian mayors denounced their complicity, one member was shot and wounded whenhis son was killed, and others resigned. Milson impressedArabs as arrogant and ignorant of their culture, I was told at the time, breakingpromises and wielding crude political patronage to no avail.

            Similarlyin that period, Israel’s army in occupied Gaza was giving money to the MuslimBrotherhood, a precursor of Hamas. That startling miscalculation was confirmedto me in 1981 by Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, Israel’s military governor for Gaza,who explained that he was instructed to build the Brotherhood as a counterpointto the PLO and the Communists, whose goal of Palestinian statehood was seen asmore threatening than Muslim fundamentalism.

            TheBrotherhood was doctrinaire religiously but also deep into social welfareservices for the impoverished Gaza population. I suppose the movement seemedbenign to Israeli officials whose hubris led them to think they understood theByzantium of Gaza’s politics.

A year later, Israelis made thesame mistake in Lebanon, where they went to war to succeed in expelling the PLObut fail dramatically at realigning Lebanese politics in a pro-Israel direction.Their favored leader, Bashir Gemayel, a Maronite Christian who had led fighterson Israel’s behalf, was assassinated by a pro-Syrian operative shortly afterbeing elected president.

More recently, Netanyahugovernments bolstered Hamas to divide Palestinians and cripple their movementfor statehood. Years after Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, Israel allowedQatar to send suitcasesfull of cash for Hamas through checkpoints into Gaza.

Devoted to Israel’s ultimatedestruction, Hamas seemed useful to Netanyahu, because it undermined thePalestinian Authority, which descended from the PLO, favored a two-statesolution, and governed parts of the West Bank under the Oslo Accords. The self-destructiveresult of this bumbling attempt at manipulation came on October 7, 2023, whenHamas fighters caught Israeli intelligence and armed forces off-guard, breachedthe defenses around Gaza, slaughtered some 1,200 people, took 251 hostages, andtriggered Israel’s massive bombing of the territory. In its brutal vengeanceduring that war, Israel forfeited its moral authority.

Under Trump, the United States isalso forfeiting its moral authority. That is an unmeasurable commodity. Itcannot be quantified in numbers of missiles, dollars per barrel, or the balanceof trade. But its depletion, with allies and adversaries alike, leaves Americahandicapped in the real world, which even Trump’s megalomania cannot tame.   

                                                         By David K. Shipler 

            In thespring of 1982, just over three years after Iran’s Islamic Revolution, I wasinvited by Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon to his sheep ranch in theNegev Desert to hear his surprising arguments about Iran. As we sat in hisspacious house, he made a strong case that Washington should work to repairrelations with Tehran—in the strategic interests of both the United States andIsrael.

            This wasnot a complete break from decades of Israeli policy toward Iran, which hadtraded oil for weapons. Yet at that moment, Sharon was voicing a bold andcounterintuitive position for his country, which was the target of anti-Zionisthatred from the government of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. And the timing wasoff, for it came when American emotions remained high, little more than a yearafter the release of American diplomatic personnel who had been held for 444days after the US Embassy was overrun.

Sharon wanted his controversialidea in The New York Times, but only “on background,” not with his nameattached. This is a trade-off journalists accept to give the public significantinformation that would not be available otherwise. So, in a broadpiece about American, Israeli, and Soviet stakes in Iran, I called him “awell-placed Israeli official,” a disguise unnecessary now, a dozen years after hisdeath.

A former general infamous forruthlessness toward Arabs, Sharon was more opportunist than ideologue. His lenswas military, not religious. He saw Iran—Muslim but not Arab—as a counterweightagainst the well-armed Arab countries. At the time, only Egypt had signed apeace treaty with Israel. Iraq, Syria, and—to a lesser extent, Jordan—remainedin the Arab order of battle.

Sharon worried about Moscow’sgains. He began his pitch by assessing Iran as the region’s most criticalMuslim country, which deserved cultivation by Washington. “In spite of all Iranhas done to the United States,” he insisted, “the United States cannot affordto permit Iran to be totally and unreservedly anti-American and leave the fieldopen to Soviet penetration.”

Furthermore, he noted that about40,000 Jews lived in Iran. “Under a regime like this one, you can consider themas hostages,” he said, making Israel responsive to Iranian requests for militaryequipment and spare parts for weapons.

In fact, Israel continued toprovide military supplies to Iran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution (250 tiresfor F-4 fighter jets in 1980, for example, ammunition and parts for tanks); itsuspended the sales under US pressure until the hostages were released in 1981,then resumed shipments for awhile. “No matter how intense their zeal againstZionism,” Sharon told me, “we don't have to fuel this fire.”

It’s safe to say that Sharon wouldnot have advocated support once Iran embarked on its  nuclearweapons program, which could ignite a nuclear arms race in a region where Israelalone has a nuclear arsenal. It’s reasonable to think that he would endorsetoday’s war against Iran. But the countries’ prior history, documentedby declassified Israeli Foreign Ministry memos and reports, offers aninstructive picture of a largely secret alignment that Israel might want to renewif a moderate government came to power there, as unlikely as that seems today.

Analyzing the official papers in2019, an Israeli human rights lawyer, Eitay Mack, described anextensive, mutually beneficial relationship from 1953 to 1979, during thedictatorial rule by Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. He had come to power afterBritish intelligence, aided by the CIA, helpedoverthrow Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, who had nationalized British oilholdings. (The scheme is well-documented in an investigative film, Coup 53.)

Under the Shah, Iran delivered oilto the Israeli port of Eilat, according to the files, from which it passed bypipeline to Ashkelon on the Mediterranean. In addition, “private andstate-owned Israeli companies, ranging from textiles, agriculture, electricalappliances, water, fertilizers, construction, aviation, shipping, gas, tiresand even dentures, had been operating extensively in Iran,” Mack wrote. “Insome years, Iran was one of the main destinations for Israeli exports.”

The papers that Mack analyzed show close Israelirelations with the Shah’s feared security police, the SAVAK, which imprisonedand tortured political opponents. According to one Foreign Ministry memo, theIranian prime minister asked in 1967 for Israel to train his chief bodyguard. Whetheror not it was done is not spelled out. But Iranian police went to Israel fortraining by the company Motorola in using communications equipment. Anddocuments show Israeli officials as keenly interested in the SAVAK’s ability tocontain pro-communist or other opposition to the Shah.

Intelligence and militarycooperation were extensive. Iran paid Israel to renovate Iranian air force andcivilian aircraft. Purchases of Israeli tanker airplanes and other weaponrywere reported. “Between 1968 and 1972,” according to Mack’s summary of thedeclassified documents, “IMI Systems [a major weapons manufacturer then ownedby the Israeli government] sold $20.9 million worth of equipment to Iran;Israel Aerospace Industries sold $1.3 million; Soltam sold $16.9 million inmortars; Motorola sold $12 million; Tadiran sold $11.3 million and set up aradio equipment factory in Iran; and Israel’s Defense Ministry sold $700,000worth of equipment.”

High-level contacts weremaintained. Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion visited Iran in 1961. PrimeMinister Golda Meir met the Shah in 1972, and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin metthe head of Iran’s security services on Dec. 8, 1974. For years, Israel andIran had offices and representatives in each other’s countries, sometimesclandestinely, and Israeli military attaches were in frequent contact withIranian officers.

A 1967 memo from Israel’sambassador in Tehran, Zvi Dorel, put it this way: “We have established a close,friendly, and practical partnership between the IDF and the security servicesand their Iranian counterparts, with joint execution of programs and missionsof national importance, with continuous mutual visits by the heads of the armedforces and their senior officials. … The Iranian army views the IDF and thesecurity services as allies and those involved in making contact andprofessional issues.”

An Israeli Finance Ministryofficial reported in 1973: “The spectrum of activity is broad, ranging from thesupply of military products and electronics manufactured by factories inIsrael, to the export of systems for creating and assembling them on the spot,training, surveys, construction, assembling and maintenance of facilities onthe ground through contractors.”

During the Iran-Iraq war of the1980s, Israel saw its interest in a weakened Iraq, so provided military supportto Iran. In 1981, Sharon publicly berated the US for allegedly providing Iraq,an arch-enemy of Israel, with artillery and ammunition. “The fact that they aresupplying these dangerous weapons to the Arab world, sophisticated weapons,puts us in a very difficult situation,” Sharon complained.

To the extent that Israel’sextensive, past relations in Iran have been translated into ongoing spynetworks, they might have complemented the sophisticated digital surveillancethat has evidently given Israel precise inside intelligence, which hasfacilitated identifying and targeting Iranian nuclear scientists and other keyfigures.

Although nationalist hatred andreligious zealotry in the Middle East can look immutable, the rise and fall ofthe Israel-Iran collaboration exemplifies fluidity. Sharon’s plea in 1982 was ayearning to recover somewhat from the virtual collapse of the relationshipafter the fall of the Shah in 1979.

Significantly, as early as 1976, Israel’sambassador in Tehran, Uri Lubrani, began to predict the Shah’s demise. “Thefeeling of many in Iran today is that the status of the Shah has begun to bequickly undermined,” he cabled to the Foreign Ministry, “a process that cannotbe reversed and will eventually lead to his defeat and a drastic change in theform of government in Iran. It is very difficult to give a time estimate and mypersonal assessment, which is not based on any objective data, is that thiswill take place more or less in the next five years.” It took three.

Israeli officials hoped for amilitary government that would maintain the relationship, but Lubrani was farfrom sanguine. “It is reasonable to assume that the monarchy will end and that,at least in the first stage, the military officers will take its place,” hewrote. “The big question is who will lead them and what direction he will take.. . . The implications of a new situation for Israel-Iran relations should theShah’s rule be undermined are grave, and the current regime of the Shah will beseen as the most positive one for Israel in Iran. Any change in thisgovernment will, to the best of our assessment, be to the detriment of ourrelations with this country.”

About a year before the end, onSept. 28, 1978, Lubrani met with the Shah and reported, “He is not the man wewere familiar with, he was distant and sometimes stares. . . He is full ofterror and uncertain of the future. The most worrisome aspect is the sense thathe seems to have made peace with his fate, without having found any strongdesire to take matters into his own hands and change it.”

After that, Iran muscled up itsmilitary, funded and armed proxies—Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Houthisin Yemen—and posed the greatest threat to Israel, while some Arab countries,also threatened by Iran, moved toward accommodation with the Jewish state.

Those proxies and Iran’s ownmilitary have been severely damaged in repeated attacks. Despite a pro-Westernrestiveness among some of Iran’s 90 million people, demonstrated by the pre-waranti-government protests that were put down with slaughter, experts on thecountry doubt that this Israeli-American war will completely overturn theradical regime that has ruled since the Shah.

        The moment has a wayof seeming permanent. Nevertheless, the Middle East is like a kaleidoscopewhose future patterns of alliances and allegiances only fools and prophetswould dare predict. The only certainty is that the kaleidoscope is being givenanother shake.

 

By David K. Shipler 

            America’smarch toward autocracy is now trying out the tools of a possible police state.Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has emerged as a national force aimednot merely at deporting undocumented immigrants but at surveilling Americansand violently suppressing constitutionally protected dissent. The effect—and theevident purpose—is to sow widespread fear.

The agents, masked and camouflagedin combat gear, are accountable to nobody except the strongman at the top, DonaldTrump. His key aide, deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, reassuredthem: "To all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conductof your duties.” As these “law enforcement” officers violate the law withimpunity, they are taking the country into phase four of its rising authoritarianism:the embryonic stage of a system whose brute force overcomes the rule of law andthe liberties of the citizens.

The First, Fourth, Fifth, and TenthAmendments in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights are being shredded by militarizedpolicing and the beatings and murders of peaceful demonstrators (FirstAmendment); the warrantless break-ins and searches of homes (Fourth Amendment);the seizures of pedestrians and drivers without probable cause or due process (Fourthand Fifth Amendments), and the bulldozing of states’ rights (Tenth Amendment). Allthat is being done in service to President Trump’s semi-dictatorial powers.

How far it will go is an openquestion. The murders of two American citizens during Minneapolis protests havesparked condemnation from much of the population, even from a few Republicanswho have belatedly found their spines. Yet the Trumpists’ longterm design looksclear enough: the recruitment and creation of a centralized apparatus above localcontrol.

This is in the playbook of everydictatorship: Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, the Soviet Union’s KGB, Venezuela’sBolivarian National Guard. In the US, the Trump government’s totalitarianaspirations to spread a radical right ideology into broad areas of America’scivil society require enforcement mechanisms that stand outside the normalstructure of constitutional democracy. They include aggressive policing, politicalprosecutions, a cowed and self-censored press, physical threats, selectivetaxation, enticements to bribe under the guise of “donations,” and financial punishment.

An element of secrecy usuallyaccompanies police-state practices, with anonymous agents out of uniform. Suchis the case with federal agents, both in ICE and Customs and Border Protection.Although they operate openly, they hide their faces, display no badges ornametags, and are barely distinguishable from gang members. A photograph of theAmerican nurse, Alex Pretti, being shot in the back while on his knees inMinneapolis could easily be mistaken for an execution by Hamas in the streetsof Gaza.

What’s more, ICE and its parentagency, the Department of Homeland Security, are conducting clandestine,high-tech monitoring of both immigrants and US citizens. Shortly before TheWashington Post lost one-third of its journalists to layoffs, it reportedon details of “intrusive technologies” that have given ICE, the mostextensively funded federal policing agency, “new surveillance powers.” Theyinclude drones, facial recognition used by agents when approaching motorists andpedestrians, license plate readers to trace people’s vehicles with fixed camerasalong streets, and trucks carrying phone trackers that “masquerade as celltowers and trick nearby cellphones to connect.” Locked phones and computersthat are seized can be hacked and decrypted by plugging them into a box withsoftware made by various private firms.

The Post alsoreported on DHS’s targeting of a 67-year-old retiree named Jon, inPennsylvania, who wrote a moderately-worded email to a federal prosecutor pleadingfor mercy for an Afghan he had readabout in the Post, who was facing deportation to his home country,where he feared that the Taliban would kill him. Five hours after Jon sent theemail, Google notified him of receiving an administrative subpoena for “informationrelated to your Google account.” Similar demands had been made to “Meta toidentify the people behind a Facebook and Instagram account that tracked ICEraids in Montgomery County [PA],” the paper found.

A couple of weeks later, twoHomeland Security agents and a local police officer knocked on Jon’s door. Anagent showed him a printout of his email, asked how he knew the prosecutor’saddress (through a Google search, Jon confessed!), put a few more questions tohim, and then left. He dared to tell his story with just his first name; he fearedfor his family’s safety.

One wonders whether the Post’sowner, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, will allow his paper such hard-hitting coverage ofthe Trumpists’ continuing abuses. Bezos has business interests involvingfederal regulation, and he has tried to curry favor with the president, mostrecently with an absurd $40 million fee for a vapid film celebrating MelaniaTrump. Some speculate that Bezos’s decimation of the news staff is another effortto mollify the bully in the White House.

It fits with a pattern among thecountry’s elites, who have never experienced dictatorship; otherwise, theywould know that the more you give in, the weaker you look, and the more powerthe autocrat wields over you. Europe repelled Trump’s appetite to own Greenland,not by wooing and flattering him but by pushing back. Instead, many US corporations,law firms, universities, news organizations, and others have pursued deals topreserve their narrow self-interests. They have failed to stand united indefiance of the coming autocracy.   

A police state’s methods are designedas force-multipliers, encouraging preemptive capitulation. A few threateningincidents are enough to quiet most of the population, who can live their liveswithout hitting the limits of freedom. It is rarely the great mass that risesup. Rather, preserving or restoring liberty usually relies on a small minority whoare courageous enough to take risks.

The US, which regards itself as exceptional,looks sadly typical so far. Several months ago, I was told by a journalist of aRussian friend who compared the first months of Trump with the first years ofPutin by observing: You Americans caved faster than we Russians did.

I suppose that’s because Russiansknew what was coming; they had lived it before. 

See essays on Phases 1 and 2 hereand Phase 3 here.

 

By David K. Shipler 

            In theunlikely event that I ever have a chance for a conversation with an agent afterhe has dragged a half-dressed middle-aged citizen from his own house, wrencheda husband from his weeping wife and children, taken a five-year-old boy into custody,or shot into the innocent face of a mother of three, here is what I would ask: 

1.      Doyou realize that the person’s face will haunt you for the rest of your life?(A former NKVD secret police agent under Stalin, writing in a letter to theSoviet magazine Ogonyok decades later, described his torment: “Now thepeople in the cases I investigated visit me at night, and instead of fear intheir eyes I see that they despise me. How can I tell these people I tortured,how can I explain that my damned life was a tragedy, too?”)

2.      Whenyour children and grandchildren ask what you were doing during the assault on America’sdemocracy, how will you answer? (Many young Germans, coming of age afterWorld War II, questioned their elders closely about what they had done during theNazi era; searing conversations often followed.)

3.      Whatdid your parents do to you? (A line from a Seinfeld episode.)

 

By David K. Shipler 

            My earliestpolitical memory is watching television film of Southern segregationistsscreaming epithets at Black children as they integrated schools in the 1950s,and police attacking peaceful civil rights demonstrators with truncheons, dogs,and fire hoses. I remember not only my own revulsion but my grandmother’s. 

            Shehad been raised in rural Maryland and had her streak of racial prejudice. Butas she sat upright in her straight-backed chair, she seethed with indignationat the crude inhumanity unfolding on the screen. Her disgust became my firstlesson in the power of decency to honor nonviolence against violence, and togenerate reform.

The scenes eventually mobilized theconscience of much of white America. A question is whether it can happen again.

This year’s holiday marking thebirthday of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., the architect of nonviolence in theCivil Rights Movement, is a fitting moment to wonder if the furious episodes ofmasked ICE agents shooting and brutalizing protesting Americans can activate—broadlyenough—whatever conscience has not been snuffed out by President Trump and hiscollaborators.

 We saw a moral uprising after a long history ofpolice killings of unarmed Blacks culminated in the videoed 2020 suffocation ofGeorge Floyd in Minneapolis. That and other murders propelled demonstrationsacross the country by millions of Americans—most of them white, significantly. Andsince Trump’s inauguration a year ago, citizens not vulnerable to deportationhave rallied against the inhumane practices by ICE agents, especially inMinneapolis, once again the center of conflict after an agent wantonly shot andkilled Renee Good, a US citizen and a mother of three; she posed no threat, videosshow, contrary to slanderous assertions by Trump and his subordinates.

In a current CBS poll,61 percent of those surveyed said that ICE was being “too tough,” up from 56percent in November. Among independents, 65 percent thought that protesterswere either doing things “about right” (33 percent) or had not gone far enough (32percent). The remaining 35 percent blamed demonstrators for going “too far.” Asone might expect, Republicans and Democrats were heavily skewed in oppositedirections, but overall, 52 percent said that ICE was making their communities “lesssafe.”

The numbers appear to show agathering storm of resentment. But how that might translate into the kind of moralmobilization that produced the civil rights laws is a question. The parallels withtoday are far from precise.

Civil rights demonstrators were trainedin the discipline of nonviolence, never fighting back when attacked as they marchedpeacefully, illegally rode segregated buses, helped Blacks register to vote, orsat in at segregated lunch counters. King, a disciple of Mahatma Gandhi, calledthis the “love ethic.” He and others bet correctly that the Southern powerstructure, through white thugs and cops, would play its role in the pageant,revealing a cruelty that did, in the end, galvanize onlookers across thecountry.

Anti-ICE protesters have no suchcoherent training and no resonant voice of leadership, and while most arepeaceful, clashes with agents draw the most vivid videos. Those taken anddoctored by right-wing activists circulate on social media, which did not existsixty years ago, and influence policy-making in the White House, which had notbeen captured back then by an authoritarian ideology of white supremacy.

Before the internet and cable news,television was dominated by the three broadcast networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC, whichgenerally kept opinion out of their reporting. Today’s opinionated newscoverage, particularly on the right, has distorted much of the public’sperceptions of reality. A side effect has been the erosion of public trust innews organizations that strive for fairness and accuracy, including The NewYork Times, The Washington Post, and National Public Radio. Opinion,it seems, is alluring enough to attract people who want their views upheld—confirmationbias, it’s called.

Right-wing “news” outlets have unquestioninglyconveyed Trump’s effort to discredit protesters as being paid by nefarious domesticenemies, a smear from the top. In the fifties and sixties, that rhetoric came largelyfrom the bottom as local and state officials dismissed civil rightsdemonstrators as “outsider agitators.”

The dynamic today has beeninverted, with Washington the enemy of peaceful protest and some state andlocal governments defending that right, which is enshrined in the FirstAmendment.

In 1957, for example, after ArkansasGovernor Orval Faubus calledout the state national guard to prevent nine Black students from entering LittleRock’s Central High School, President Dwight D. Eisenhower acted. He pressedFaubus to use the guard to assure peaceful integration, as the Supreme Courthad ordered in Brown v. Board of Education three years earlier. But whenFaubus withdrew the guard instead and rioting erupted, Eisenhower federalizedthe guard and sent 101st Airborne troops to restore order andprotect the students.

Today, it is the federal governmentthat is trying to crush demonstrators and the state and local governments inMinnesota that are trying to protect them. It is the White House that issuppressing an investigation into the Minneapolis shooting and the state thatwants to hold the agent accountable.

The inversion of righteousness istelling. America is a different country now. The threshold at which outrage istriggered has risen very high as Trump and company have numbed us to violationsof ethics, laws, social norms, democratic processes, racial respect, and other featuresof a pluralistic and orderly culture. He has created, in ICE, a national, paramilitaryforce unlike anything seen before in the United States, unaccountable to thelaw or to the norms of decency.

Seared in my memory is thephotograph, from Little Rock, of a white girl’s face twisted in hatred as she screamedat a Black girl seeking to go to Central High. The country came to see itself inthis mirror.

My grandmother did not become aflaming liberal, but she loved Eisenhower, and I think his actions affected herviews on race. She did not object on principle when my mother and I went to the1963 March on Washington, where King declared, “I have a dream.” She was worriedfor us, because violence was ridiculously predicted by J. Edgar Hoover, the FBIdirector. But in the end, the crowd was a sweep of massive friendliness anduplifting harmony, a tribute to the conscience of America.

 

By David K. Shipler 

For we mustconsider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people areupon us.

--John Winthrop, 1630

 

            The stirringphrase “city upon a hill” was coined not as a description of the United Statesbut as an aspiration, a challenge, applied to the Massachusetts Bay Colony by JohnWinthrop in a sermon probably delivered at sea, before arriving in New England.Since then, as quoted by Presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, it hasmorphed into a mirage of self-adulation—not a hope but a supposed achievement.

             “I've spoken of the shining city all mypolitical life,” Reagan declared in his farewelladdress: “In my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger thanoceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living inharmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce andcreativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and thedoors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how Isaw it, and see it still. . . . And she's still a beacon, still a magnet forall who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places whoare hurtling through the darkness, toward home.”

            You want toweep when you read these words today. Even putting aside Reagan’s own failuresto keep that beacon bright (he opposed the monumental civil rights acts, forexample, and slandered the poor on welfare), the metaphor imagined the best of acomplicated America. It was accepted globally, though not unanimously, as modelingdemocratic freedom and economic opportunity. Millions from around the world havestruggled to climb up to this shining city on a hill.

Now it is becoming a fortress. Inmerely one year, President Trump and his minions have recast the model. It isno longer a robust democracy but a semi-dictatorship fueled by a cult ofpersonality supported by a critical mass of Americans. No longer is the rule oflaw its bedrock. No longer can the public’s discontent be reliably translatedinto political change. No longer does free speech flourish under a governmentthat regards dissent as punishable. No longer do its officials or many of itsprivate institutions embrace that essential American idea: the din of manyideas. No longer is it entirely safe for “the people peaceably to assemble . .. for a redress of grievances,” as the First Amendment provides. Whateverharmony the country enjoyed among “people of all kinds” has dissolved intodiscord under a government driven by the ideology of white supremacy.    

No longer are the doors open. Nolonger will America be the world’s leader in medical and other scientificresearch, whose grants Trumpists have summarily shredded, and whose foreignresearchers are increasingly afraid to enter the United States. No longer is ita benefactor of assistance to the suffering populations of poorer countries. Nolonger does it hold membership in scores of critical internationalorganizations that do good globally. No longer is it a champion of democracyand human rights worldwide. No longer is it faithful to facts and truth andrespect for the power of pure knowledge.

The country is being walled offfrom an outside world it seeks to dominate, a peculiar paradox. It is bothisolationist and imperialist, retreating from humanitarian interactions and relyingon brute force for its foreign policy, trashing its treaties and alliances, andprojecting warfare into countries of Trump’s choosing—restrained only by “my ownmorality, my own mind,” he toldThe New York Times. Trump’s disregard for international law andnorms in his seizure of Venezuela’s president; his unilateral declaration ofownership of its oil; and his designs on Greenland, the Panama Canal, and evenCanada, reinforce Russian and Chinese propaganda, which has long cast the US asa neocolonial power. That propaganda has had traction in many developingcountries; now it cannot be denied.

So, the United States can no longerbe counted on to uphold the peaceful order that has prevailed since World WarII. It cannot be seen reliably as a global power, for Trump favors carving upthe world into spheres of influence, apparently ready to concentrate on theWestern Hemisphere and leaving Europe to Russia, and Asia to China. The world,and America itself, is a much more dangerous place under Trumpism, and America willbe much less great.

 Of course, as honest history knows—not the sanitizedhistory that Trumpist authoritarianism is trying to impose—John Winthrop’s exaltedhilltop was eventually tainted by great crimes: the displacement and slaughterof Native Americans, the enslavement of Africans, the indentured servitude thathelped lay the foundations of the country’s prosperity.  

Myths can be stubborn, though, soit remains to be seen how soon the uplifting mirage of America will dissipate,how quickly it will be replaced by the menacing fortress being constructed.Some overseas express sympathy for Americans living in a dying democracy; some expressfear and disgust. Some at home and abroad see merely a temporary aberration ina society that has proved self-correcting; others see an embedded, authoritarianrestructuring designed to survive Trump. And some who do not regard the oldAmerica as divinely given see the new America as the inevitable turning of history’swheel: Nothing is permanent, not even a shining city upon a hill.

 

By David K. Shipler 

            Havingdemolished much of the best scientific research supported by the federalgovernment, ignored congressional acts that created and funded agencies,harassed the private sector into accepting racial discrimination, bullied mediacorporations into self-censorship, erased historical truths, distortedgovernment fact-gathering, sent masked agents to grab immigrants, deployedhapless national guard onto peaceful streets, and severely damaged the rule oflaw and the constitutional separation of powers, Donald Trump and hiscollaborators now turn their draconian radicalism against the country’s systemof free elections.

            This is PhaseThree in the demise of democracy. Whether the Trumpists succeed remains an openquestion, but they are laying the groundwork for what experts who have studieddictatorships term “competitive authoritarianism.” It means that elections areheld but are manipulated so the opposition party has little or no chance ofcoming to power, as in Hungary and Turkey.

            Theelements of the effort are these:

Political prosecutions ofopposition (Democratic) figures. Trump is mobilizing a complicit Justice Department to take revenge on critics byinflating minor or imagined infractions into criminal charges. The efforts againstformer FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia Jameshave been blocked so far by a federal district court judge and two grand juriesof citizens honest enough to refuse to indict James, who won a major businessfraud case against Trump. But the James case might be revived, and otherprosecutions are in the offing.

            In what TheNew York Times calls “a nebulous and far-reaching” federal investigation,former officials involved in bringing criminal cases against Trump are beingsubpoenaed, with a grand jury empaneled in southern Florida to considerconspiracy charges. Prosecutors of the January 6 rioters are also injeopardy. Democratic Senator Adam Schiff of California, who led the firstimpeachment prosecution of Trump, is under investigation. Senator Mark Kelly ofArizona, a retired Navy captain, is being investigated by the Pentagon for hispart in a video by six Democratic lawmakers reminding military personnel thatthey can and must refuse illegal orders. He could theoretically be recalled toactive duty and court-martialed under Article 88 of the Uniform Code ofMilitary Justice, which prohibits “contemptuous words against the President,the Vice President,” and other officials.

            Low-levelskirmishes involving elected Democrats have been magnified. Senator AlexPadilla of California, who tried repeatedly to ask a question during a pressconference by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, was handcuffed andpushed out of the room by FBI agents. Representative LaMonica McIver, who wasjostled in a scuffle with ICE agents as Democratic officials tried to inspectan immigration detention facility in New Jersey, has been charged withassaulting an officer—an accusation ridiculous to anyone who watches the video.And so on.

             The question is how far Trump will go inordering arrests and prosecutions, particularly of Democratic candidates whohave a chance of winning in key districts in November. The American atmosphereis being contaminated by a miasma of concocted crimes fabricated by Trump,Attorney General Pam Bondi, and other zealots. They are poised to use theirauthority to indict and arrest whenever politically convenient. America’straditional rule of law is being shredded, barely held together by lower-courtjudges and by Democratic politicians brave enough to endure threats to theirliberties and physical safety.

“But if they can’t be charged,” pledgedEd Martin, a powerful Justice Department official, “we will name them. And wewill name them, and in a culture that respects shame, they should be peoplethat are ashamed.”

            An obviousflaw in this plan is that American culture no longer respects shame, as demonstratedby the ho-hum reaction to Trump’s crude cruelty and blatant corruption. On theother hand, millions of Americans have been so inured to the Trumpists’perpetual lying that    Martin’s approach could backfire into highervoter turnout for the targeted candidate. In a tight election, you might evenwish to be accused by an administration reviled by your potential voters.

Yet there is an unseen impact thatcan damage the future of democracy: the uncounted number of honest, decentAmericans who become unwilling to face the fear of running for office, ofprosecuting crime, of overseeing elections. A dictatorship seeks not merely topunish precisely but to generate fear and aversion, a method of self-policingthat is already being felt as many Americans hesitate to demonstrate, tocriticize, or to resist through their institutions.

The November elections are likelyto suffer from other well-known methods of manipulation.

            Disqualification of pro-Democraticvoters. Accomplished through purges of voter registration roles and voterID requirements that discriminate against low-income citizens who don’t havedriver’s licenses or other acceptable credentials.

Partisan and racialgerrymandering. Mid-decade redistricting in Texas, while rejected

as race-based by a federal judge after days of extensivetestimony, was approved by the right-wing radicals on the Supreme Court. Theyalso seem poised, in a separate case from Louisiana, to deal a fatal blow tothe momentous 1965 Voting Rights Act by interpreting racial gerrymandering aspartisan. Under precedent, disfavoring a race is banned by the act but favoringa party is not, even though race is often a proxy for party preferences. Wehave a Supreme Court of Sophistry.

Democrats are likely to reply, asthey have by redistricting in California, which would provoke a race by bothparties to the bottom, landing well below good government. Republican-ledstates will have a numerical advantage in tilting the House in their direction.But there is some Republican resistance, as in Indiana recently, whereredrawing lines to put some pro-Democratic voters in solid Republican districtswould have forced comfortable Republican legislators to actually work to getreelected.

            Distortions in counting andcertifying votes. Newly empowered local officials in some states, includingGeorgia, can refuse or delay their obligation to certify votes based on littlemore than vague assertions of discrepancies. Pro-Trump election deniers havepopulated a number of county boards in various states, raising the risk ofcertification becoming optional and effectively erasing Democratic votes. Howwidely this danger spreads, against the legions of honest election workerscourageous enough to stomach threats, is a question to be answered in November.

            Courtchallenges. Over time, the rigor of lower court judges in upholding the lawmay be eroded by highly partisan nominees to the bench, a hallmark of Trump’ssecond term. While the Republicans lost some 65 lawsuits aimed at overturningthe 2020 election results, a Trumpist strategy of remaking the federaljudiciary, which already succeeded at the Supreme Court level, is likely todiminish the integrity of the lower courts as well.

            Besides,Trump operates mostly outside the constitutional system, while Americans whoresist still act within it—through the courts, through the ballot box, throughthe street protests designed to raise consciousness about the dying democracy.

The patchwork of Americanresistance combines with the patchwork of acquiescence to Trump’s accumulationof semi-dictatorial powers. That gives no assurance that the democracy can besaved. Voting, which has always been the most effective means of protest, willbe tested as a method of preservation in November and, more dramatically, in thepresidential election 2028. Welcome to Phase Three. 

You can watch my more detaileddiscussion of the fate of American democracy here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uohhPd04b4g&t=272s

                                                         By David K. Shipler 

            The man whocraves a Nobel Peace Prize is looking for ways to play with his soldiers. Hedeclares great swaths of the American citizenry the enemy from within and sendsbefuddled National Guard troops into cities governed by his politicalopposition. He threatens to go "guns-a-blazing" into Nigeria to stop murdersof Christians. He labels occupants of small boats “terrorists” when he imagines,with no proof, that they they might be transporting drugs. He launches amilitary buildup led by the largest US aircraft carrier to waters nearVenezuela in preparation for a possible military assault to overturn thegovernment of the socialist president, Nicolas Maduro.

            This isDonald Trump the peacemaker who did manage to get a shaky end to Israel’s warin Gaza, but who blustered ineffectually about ending Russia’s war in Ukraineand renamed the Department of Defense the Department of War. And this is DonaldTrump the strongman who undermines his military’s combat expertise by lettinghis defective “War Secretary,” Pete Hegseth, purge the senior ranks of the mostcompetent officers, a likely step toward politicizing the armed forces withright-wing, white Christian nationalists.

            If thisarray of odd behavior appears contradictory and hypocritical, let’s look again.It contains significant consistencies of personality and method.

            PresidentTrump thrives on conflict and confrontation, as if his brain chemistry neededthe fix. He enhances his power by tough-guy unpredictability, trying for fear,flattery, and capitulation in both warmaking and peacemaking scenarios. Thissometimes succeeds, but not always.

If no conflict or crisis exists, hecreates or imagines one, then reimagines it as disappearing because of his boldacts. He’s already practices this sleight of hand by thanking himself forrestoring order in US cities where no disorder prevailed, and by curtailingdrug smuggling via routes where it barely existed. Sadly, his pattern ofimagining and reimagining is not just a frivolous magician’s act. It hurts andkills people.

            Another constantin Trump’s disjointed military policies is theatrical. He is a showman, and theWhite House is his stage. The set on which he performs may or may not resemblereality—usually not. But no matter. Once created, it becomes the defininglandscape of his policies, and woe to the underling who disbelieves.

            Therefore,according to Trump, peaceful demonstrators are violent if they oppose hispolicies. Cities’ falling crime rates disappear from his portrayalof “crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse,” as he describedWashington, DC. His National Guard have supposedly rescued cities by standing aroundlooking awkward or picking up trash. His bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites was nofantasy, of course, but he brought the curtain down a bit too soon as heimmediately declared the facilities “obliterated.”After the Defense Intelligence Agency submitted a contradictory, preliminary assessment,Hegseth firedits commander, Lieut. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse, along with two other seniorofficials. So much for reporting accurately up the chain of command.

            Trump’s performativestyle doesn’t often work well in the real world of complexity. It might grabinitial acquiescence from weaker players, but the grand posturing of adealmaker usually needs follow-up. Trump likes to stop the play mid-act when itreaches a positive turn, an illusory happy ending. But military matters don’tobey the impresario. Wars impart suffering, not glory, and a big mouth can’tend them.

            Thetwenty-point Gaza peace plan is an example of a set of good ideas and a hopefulbeginning that will tax Trump’s ability to follow through. With more pressurethan practically any other president has exerted, Trump leaned on PrimeMinister Benjamin Netanyahu to win a ceasefire that is mostly holding, an exchangeof hostages and prisoners, a restoration of humanitarian aid, and a partialpullback of Israel troops. It was no small achievement: a good first act.

If the audience went home at theintermission, Trump would surely be delighted. But we’re still watching. Thelong-term plan to rebuild Gaza and build peace with international military andcivilian involvement requires nitty-gritty bargaining with Arab states, Turkey,Israel, and a fractured Palestinian leadership. If it requires intricate ongoingmanagement by Trump himself, far beyond a capability that he has demonstrated,it is likely to falter in the morass of Middle East grievance and radicalism.So, will the applause he enjoyed for the first act satisfy him? Is his showover? Will he now lose interest?

            Anotherconstant in warmaking and peacemaking is Trump’s willingness to threaten justabout anything to cow countries that stand in his way. It is the syndrome of amafia boss, which  can be useful againstweaker adversaries who are scared of his impulsive craziness. He is obviously willingto do bad things to people who don’t obey his commands, a practice that is defeatingdemocracy at home as too many American institutions avoid standing up to him.

That bludgeon is also a burden,though. The bully in him, which sees others as susceptible to both his threatsand his flattery, can lead to misjudgments of character. The most dangerous casehas been his hot-and-cold relationship with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who hasbeen both admired and reviled by Trump. Indeed, Trump’s insensitivity to shadesof gray, his binary approach to people, actually makes him a lousy negotiatorwhere hard work is needed to reach the end of a difficult road.

He praised Putin, and Putin praisedhim, and nothing came of it. Campaigning on the promise to end the Ukraine warin 24 hours, Trump in office gave up his two major bargaining chips withouteven starting talks: He offered Russia some Ukrainian territory and a pledgenot to accept Ukraine into NATO. He staged an unseemly row with UkrainianPresident Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office and mouthed some of Putin’stalking points, asserting that Ukraine started the war.

All that made Trump look too eagerto deliver on his loud boast, an obvious effort to win that coveted Nobel PeacePrize. So, no surprise, Putin continued the war as usual. Perhaps he missed achance to take advantage of that moment to fashion some form of agreement. Andhe denied Trump the applause he treasures. So, climbing the steep learningcurve, an annoyed Trump flipped on the Russian leader. “We get a lot ofbullshit thrown at us by Putin,” he saidin July. “He’s very nice all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless.”(This would not have been news to him if he had longtime Putin-watchers on hisstaff, or if he’d watched Putin himself.)

How do Trump’s showmanship, crisiscreation, and tough tactics inform his military policies? We are seeing themunfold around Venezuela. First, his imagination conflates criminal and militarythreats, using the wartime label “armed conflict” to describe the US vs. thedrug cartels. Second, he portrays Venezuela as a source of life-threateningnarcotics when it actually producesor smuggles none of the fentanyl bound for the US and hardly any of thecocaine. Although some drug-laden flights depart from Venezuela, the majorsmuggling routes are not through the Caribbean, but via the Pacific and intothe US over land.

It is hard to see what a coming warwould be about. It might unseat and seize Maduro, who has been indicted as acartel head, and is commonly regarded as having stolen the last election. Itmight open Venezuela’s vast oil reserves to American exploitation, although Madurooffered as much in talks that Trump called off. A senior official told TheNew York Times that the military deployment is designed as pressure onMaduro over oil.

What a war would definitely not beabout is what Trump has consistently touted as the issue, one that mostAmericans can grasp with strong concern: the drug trade.

 And yet, the show must go on.